In the preparation of deep fat fried food products, it is conventional to coat food pieces with a batter by dipping, spraying, cascading, etc., applying breading (e.g., corn meal, bread and cracker crumbs, etc.) and then frying the freshly breaded food pieces. Within recent years the establishment of central breading operations and sale of pre-breaded, fryable food products to the trade has become a rapidly growing food industry. Due to the perishable character of these products, it would be most advantageous to provide the consumer with a frozen, uncooked, breaded product.
It is conventional to employ gelatinized and/or ungelatinized cereal starches or cereal flours in aqueous batters with other optional ingredients such as egg solids, corn meal, cream of tartar, seasoning, flavoring agents, coloring agents, salt, edible thickening agents, etc. These starch containing batters are frequently identified by the art as starch batters or flour batters. Starch batters are usually formulated as an aqueous slurry of ungelatinized starch. Functionally these starch batters are supposed to adhesively coat and adhere to the food piece surface and provide an adhesive matrix for breading. It is essential that the starch batters maintain their adhesive character during the frying step and impart a high quality color, texture, taste and mouthfeel to the ultimate fried product.
Starch batters are economically attractive to industry, but possess inherent defects which have heretofore limited their adaptability and usage in batter breading and frying operations. The art has attempted to correct these inherent deficiencies by utilizing a variety of starches alone or in combination with supplemental starch batter additives. Early starch batter systems were primarily predicated upon either starch containing flours or granular starches. In an attempt to improve upon these starch batters, a host of edible thickeners such as vital wheat gluten, non-fat milk solids, soya protein, gum arabic, sodium alginate, carboxymethyl cellulose, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, etc. have been proposed as supplemental batter additives.
Chemically modified or pregelled starches have also been proposed as a partial or complete replacement for the unmodified, granular batter starches. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,607,393 by Gabel et al., 3,655,443 by C. Campbell and 3,208,851 by J. A. Ancinori et al. suggest replacing the raw starches with oxidized, granular starches. Chemically inhibited granular starches (e.g., granular starches reacted with polyfunctional cross-linking agents to impart a greater resistance towards pasting or gelationization) have also been proposed as a replacement for unmodified granular starches in U.S. Pat. No. 3,052,545 by J. J. Ducharme et al.
Starch batters containing pregelled or pasted starches have also been proposed. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,723,137 by Fischer et al., batter coatings are formed directly on a food piece by coating a prewetted food piece with dry pregelled starches. These pregelled starch coated food pieces are immersed in a fluid to provide a battered product. Pasted alkali and alkaline earth dichlorocyanurate starch batters are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,317,346 by W. H. Kibbel, Jr., et al. In German Federal Republic Application 2,136,636 starch batters containing from about 20% to about 45% by weight gelatinized starch have been proposed as a possible alternative.
As evident from the aforementioned art, a host of unmodified and modified batter starches have been proposed as a possible means for correcting the inherent functional defects of starch batters. Notwithstanding, the starch batter problem (especially with poultry products) still persists as evident by Poultry Science: 51 (4) pages 1215-1222 by Baker et al. (1972) and 47 pages 739-746 by Hale et al. (1968) and "Adhesion of Coatings on Frozen Fried Chicken" by H. Hanson et al. in Food Technology 17 pages 793-796 (1963) (all of which are incorporated herein by reference). The starch batters presently available to the food industry are not suitable for use in certain processes which involves freezing of uncooked, breaded food pieces (e.g., chicken, pork, beef pieces ) and subsequent frying thereof.